“Dan Brown’s forthcoming Inferno, of which Dante will be the central subject, has already got me trembling. Brown might have discovered that the Divine Comedy is an encrypted prediction of how the world will be taken over by the National Rifle Association. When the movie comes out, with Harrison Ford as Dante and Megan Fox as Beatrice, it will be all over for mere translators.” Clive James, by the book.

Last night Daniel Smith taught me the word anxiolytics. It means “anxiety reducers.” (Dan is the author of Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety, so he should know.) His favorite nonchemical anxiolytic is Singin’ in the Rain. Mine, for now, is “Jesus Dropped the Charges,” by the O’Neal Twins. —Lorin Stein

The 1935 Silly Symphony cartoon “Cookie Carnival” raises so many questions, but most pressing: What is a rum cookie? The highly enlightening Wikipedia article informs us that the animated short, in which various varieties of baked good compete for the title of Cookie Queen, is a take on the Atlantic City bathing-beauty contests of the day, precursors to Miss America pageants. (Incidentally, the gingerbread hobo is voiced by the same actor who immortalized Goofy.) As a friend of mine commented, “Misses Licorice and Coconut were robbed.” And it’s true: Sugar Cookie’s easy victory (after she dons a blonde taffy wig, that is) is a testament to how little standards of beauty have changed, however much baked goods have. —Sadie Stein

Leanne Shapton’s Swimming Studies, which comes out in early July, needs to be on everyone’s bookshelf this summer. Or, more fittingly, in the pool house. And the latest Vanity Fair has a fun article about the origins of that hideously romantic painting The Singing Butler, which I’m sure you’ll recognize once you see it. —Thessaly La Force

“Helpless,” by Poindexter. I heard this song playing in a store downtown and was convinced it was a new track by French electro band Phoenix. Poindexter gets it right with well-placed cymbal crashes and the type of moody synth that sound tracks an eighties teenage tryst on a foggy night. You can buy “Helpless” off fashion’s jack of all trades (Kitsune) album Kitsune America. SO DO IT. —Noah Wunsch

If you have children to shop for, you can do them no greater favor than to introduce them to Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy-Tacy series, the first four volumes of which were just rereleased with original Lois Lenski illustrations by Harper Perennial. —Sadie Stein

“This is going green 1949 style, bitch. Believe that.” That’s Ice Cube rhapsodizing on Ray and Charles Eames’s Case Study House #8 in the Pacific Palisades. The short video, in which Ice Cube praises L.A.’s architectural sublimity, is part of “Pacific Standard Time,” an exhibition I wish (impossibly) were traveling to the East Coast. —Nicole Rudick

Life is full of doomed quests—and then it tosses up the weird happy ending, with naked children wandering around on the dinner table. See for instance Wyatt Mason’s amazing profile of Ai Weiwei, now an e-book from GQ. —Lorin Stein

If you are in New York this winter, stop by the Asia Society to see Sarah Sze’s kinetic new show “Infinite Line.” I’ve always been drawn to Sze’s webbed sculptures, but this time I particularly liked a series of pen-and-ink llustrations, each of which depict twelve seminal (but confidential!) events in the lives of friends and collectors. Each unfurls with Escher-like intricacy—but also pluckiness and whimsy. —Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn

Check out Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1953 film, The Wages of Fear, this weekend, either here in New York at the Film Forum or on DVD. It’s kind of like Speed, but with no love story and an overlay of existentialism. Oh, and more entertaining than that implies. —S.S.

Beloved by writers and artists for more than a century, the iconic Moleskine notebook has paired up with The Paris Review for the ultimate stocking stuffer. Embossed with The Paris Review’s logo and featuring a Dorothy Parker quote from her 1956 interview, it’s already on the wish list of everyone at 62 White Street.

Kaweco, one of the world’s oldest pen companies, created the Sport fountain pen in the 1920s for “ladies, officers and sportsmen,” but we use our special Paris Review Sport pen for grocery lists. It’s tiny and compact, but when uncapped, it’s the perfect length for writing. Takes a standard cartridge.

We can’t stop awwwing over these adorable onesies, made of 100% cotton and printed with a hand-written Paris Review logo. For slightly older friends, choose from toddler and youth tees in a range of vibrant colors.

Peyton Sawyer's House on One Tree Hill— and John Jeremiah Sullivan's in life.

Last spring our Southern editor, John Jeremiah Sullivan, came up to New York to give a little reading here on White Street. The surprising but true story he read, about living on the set of One Tree Hill—because it was his family’s house—just appeared in the new issue of GQ:

My wife was eight months pregnant, and we lived in a one-bedroom apartment, the converted ground floor of an antebellum house, on a noisy street downtown, with an eccentric upstairs neighbor, Keef, from Leland, who told me that I was a rich man—that’s how he put it, “Y’er a rich man, ain’t ye?”—who told us that he was going to shoot his daughter’s boyfriend with an ultra-accurate sniper rifle he owned, for filling his daughter full of drugs, “shoot him below the knee,” he said, “that way they cain’t get you with intent to kill.” Keef had been a low-level white supremacist and still bore a few unfortunate tattoos but told us he’d lost his racism when, on a cruise in the Bahamas, he’d saved a drowning black boy’s life, in the on-ship pool, and by this conversion experience “came to love some blacks.” He later fell off a two-story painting ladder and broke all his bones. A fascinating man, but not the sort I wanted my daughter having unlimited exposure to in her formative years. Not my angel. We entered nesting panic. We wanted big and solid. We wanted Greatest Generation, but their parents, even greater. We found it. It had a sleeping porch, and a shiplike attic where I in my dotage would pull objects from a trunk and tell their histories to little ones. We asked for the money, and in some office somebody’s boss came forward with the Stamp.

As readers of the Daily know, we don’t publish criticism. But over at his day job, our Southern Editor has written a deep review of David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel, The Pale King—a review that is really an essay on Wallace and his peculiar place in American fiction (and nonfiction).

Of The Pale King, Sullivan writes:

You’d be forgiven for suspecting that a book about random people who work for the government sounds insufferably tedious. The reason it’s not has to do with the word about—it’s the wrong word, the wrong preposition. Wallace doesn’t write about his characters; he hadn’t in a long time. He writes into them. That thing he could do on a tennis court or a cruise ship, or at a porn convention, that made him both an inspiration and a maddening, envy-making presence for the scores like me who learned to do “magazine writing” in his shadow (he was one of those writers who, even when you weren’t sounding like him, made you think about how you weren’t sounding like him)—Wallace liked to do that, in his fiction, with his characters’ interior lives.

Imagine walking into a place, say a mega-chain copy shop in a strip mall. It’s early morning, and you’re the first customer. You stop under the bright fluorescents and let the doors glide closed behind you, look at the employees in their corporate-blue shirts, mouths open, shuffling around sleepily. You take them in as a unified image, with an impenetrable surface of vague boredom and dissatisfaction that you’re content to be on the outside of, and you set to your task, to your copying or whatever. That’s precisely the moment when Wallace hits pause, that first little turn into inattention, into self-absorption. He reverses back through it, presses play again. Now it’s different. You’re in a room with a bunch of human beings. Each of them, like you, is broken and has healed in some funny way. Each of them, even the shallowest, has a novel inside. Each is loved by God or deserves to be. They all have something to do with you: When you let the membrane of your consciousness become porous, permit osmosis, you know it to be true, we have something to do with one another, are part of a narrative—but what? Wallace needed very badly to know. And he sensed that the modern world was bombarding us with scenarios, like the inside of the copy shop, where it was easy to forget the question altogether. We “feel lonely in a crowd,” he writes in one of his stories, but we “stop not to dwell on what’s brought the crowd into being,” with the result that “we are, always, faces in a crowd.”

That’s what I love in Wallace, noticed details like that, microdescriptions of feeling states that seem suggestive of whole branching social super-systems, sentences that make me feel like, Anyone who doesn’t get that is living in a different world. He was the closest thing we had to a recording angel.